* Drafts & Translations
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"Catastrophes": Way of life of
Capital

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Seveso, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Sandoz, etc - a long
list. These were not blunders, but are part of the inescapable tendency
of capitalist production. Leftists, greens and all kinds of philanthropic
packs of wolves, mobilize and shout through the spectacle of poverty about
the lack of information, lack of safety precautions, media blackouts. Confused
debates ensue about the responsibility of public bodies and organisations,
whining about the excesses of capitalism and proposals for miraculous solutions
to adjust the capitalist order, as if the dangers of nuclear technology
or the chemical industry were not one of the fundamental expressions, among
many others, of the horror of capital's domination.

They get indignant about this state of affairs
and demand clean and rational capitalism, led by Science. Science and rationality
are merely research for profit. Science, the "whore" of Capital. Capitalist
waste corresponds to the rationality of capital, whose raison d'etre is
the production of capital. Chemical industries and civilian and military
nuclear industries do indeed represent a threat for humankind because of
serious, irreversible pollution, in particular because, by the logic of
its system, capital generates submission of the totality of humankind,
especially proletarians, as well as natural resources, to its anarchic
functioning.

However, it is in all areas of daily life
that capital, incessantly in search of greater profit, mutilates and massacres
individuals through this technology of prostitution.

Capital is the concentration of population
in cities so one can no longer breathe, the incessantly increasing mass
of individual cars, air and water pollution, etc.

Capital is also industrial injuries, deaths
due to increasing poverty, doctored foods, town planning with overcrowding
into poky little holes in an universe of concrete, great famines never
due to natural causes, but to capital, which undermines non-profit-making
agriculture, constructs dams and cities on high-risk terrain, etc.

Economy(ies), profits...

Capital is never innocent in catastrophes.
They are not the product of fate, but of the race to profit, to profitability.
Catastrophes are directly provoked and worsened by social causes.

In the past:

Primitive man, just like the animals, picked
and consumed fruits that nature produced itself; and just like the animals,
he avoided the natural raging of the elements which he was incapable of
controlling and the phenomena which threatened his life.

Today:

The emergence of capital and commodity-production
supposes the domination of man on nature. The variety of the earth's natural
products and the need to use them, to save them, played a decisive role
in the history of the development of commodity relationships and those
between man and the "natural environment".

Beyond each one's particular gravity, catastrophes
express a more general situation. Military and technical development and
the race for profit impose the logic of profit and profitability, to the
detriment of proletarians.

Capital, hungry for over-work, ends up not
only extorting the greatest possible amount of work-force from the living,
to the extent that it shortens their existence, but makes good business
out of the destruction of dead labour (equipment, buildings,...) in so
far as it allows the products still useful (only for the needs of proletarians)
to be replaced by new living labour.

When catastrophes destroy dwellings, cultures,
etc., they destroy a certain wealth. This lost wealth was an accumulation
of past work. To eliminate the effects of the catastrophe, it is necessary
to have a huge mass of current, living labour. It is more beneficial for
capital not to invest in maintenance, security,... On the other hand, reconstruction
allows it to "use" living labour, therefore to exploit proletarians. Capital,
in its logic, has to annihilate still useful dead labour - destruction
of things that are no longer profitable for it - whose only usefulness
is to satisfy needs.

"Capital, oppressor of the living,
also assassinates the dead."

In the past:

The bourgeoisie glorified science and technology
by presenting them as an absolute good and spread the idea that society
can put humankind in the best conditions to struggle against the difficulties
of the natural environment, by way of technical, scientific and productive
development. It is progress, it declared, that will resolve all the problems
of humanity and proletarians must submit to this new divinity and serve
it.

Today:

The more progress has developed, the more the
living conditions of the proletariat have worsened."Revolutionary history will not define
the capitalist age as the age of the rational, but as that of junk. From
all the idols that man has known, those of modern progress and technology
will fall from the altars with the greatest crash." - Marx -

Capital must be destroyed, there is nothing
else that can be done with it.

The theory according to which the technical
forces of production will be useful to future generations by the prodigious
productivity of work once capital and its constraints of profit have been
annihilated, in fact signifies ever-increasing exploitation for the proletariat
today.

Capital, in its frantic struggle for valorization,
can only be progressive (that is to say destructive), always producing
more to valorize without taking human needs into account - the race to
profit inevitably entails the destruction of the whole of humanity.

However, it is not suicidal, so it produces
its own humanitarian organizations to struggle against its own excesses.

When the capitalist class realized that its
cosy existence was at risk of being threatened by the rotting monster,
environmentalism appeared. Ecologists are merely regulators of capital,
they are an integral part of the State. Their myopia and their impotence
forbid them to go back to the real causes and especially to tackle them.

It is not man in general, nor society in
general, which are responsible for the poisoning of nature and man's life,
but a precise mode of production, governed by precise laws, characterized
by the generalization of the production of commodities by way of wage labour.
Pollution, disasters, etc. are only aspects, consequences of the development
of commodity-production, of the frantic race of capital for its valorization.

The ecologists' drivel systematically praises
nature and all that is natural.

"By drivelling too much about nature,
one gets to the point of idealizing the state where naked men scratched
the ground with their nails to find edible tubers." - Marx -

It's not a question of advocating a return
to "nature" and "natural conditions".

It is not about planting three trees in the
concrete or instituting upper legal limits on the progressively stupefying
effects and slow death by asphyxiating pollutants. Environmentalism represents
the reaction of capital to its own excesses, its attempt to control and
limit its anachronistic destruction.

Environmentalism addresses its appeals to
man and to society in general, to all willing to listen. It is worse than
ineffective because it is indignant about some of the effects of capital
and yet takes good care not to tackle their causes. Speaking to everyone,
it drowns the proletariat in a general unity of all citizens.

It is as absurd and criminal to claim that
capitalism can be clean and non-polluting as it is to claim that there
can be capitalism without oppression, without massacre, without poverty,
etc. As long as capitalism exists, it will exploit and oppress men, and
as long as it exists, it will devastate nature. It is necessary to finish
with and to destroy this society, and the proletariat must break all solidarity
with capital and rediscover the terrain of class struggle.

"The immense river of human history
also has its threatening and irresistible floods. When the wave increases,
it roars against both dikes that shut it in. On the right hand is the conformist
dike, for the conservation of traditional and existent forms - a continuous
passage of priests chanting in procession, of cops on patrol, of schoolmasters
and charlatans spouting official lies and the class scholastic. On the
left hand, the reformist dike: members of "popular" parties, professionals
of opportunism, members of parliament and chiefs of progressist trade-unions
are crowded in there. Bandying insults on both sides of the current, both
processions claim to possess the recipe to see to it that the powerful
river continues its suppressed and forced course. But at the great moments
of history, the current breaks all hindrances, overflows its banks and
"leaps", as the Pô at Guastalla and at Volano, towards an unexpected
direction, sweeping away both sordid gangs in the irresistible wave of
revolution, reversing dikes of all kinds, and giving to the society, as
to the earth, a new face."